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Google's Ngram Viewer can be used to show the relative popularity of a word or phrase in its various collections over time, and it does have American and British English corpora. E.g. 'mum' comes ...
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#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/49030 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#2: Initial revision
[Google's Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams) can be used to show the relative popularity of a word or phrase in its various collections over time, and it does have American and British English corpora. E.g. 'mum' comes in at 0.00001% in the American English corpus in 2000, and 0.00003% in British English, so one can surmise it's a British spelling; 'freak out' is distinctly American, at 0.000012% compared to the British 0.000004%. There is, of course, a degree of cross-pollination, especially with more recent data, but it's a good starting point.